simplicity piled upon simplicity creates complexity. - Matt Ridley

Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes make’s an animal’s descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all. We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not “evolving.”

A gene is by definition the descendant of a gene that was good at getting into future generations.

The technological problems of suburban life may be a million miles from those of the Pleistocene savanna, but the human ones are not.